


Love is the Punchline 3

by mixedwithintellect



Series: Love is the Punchline [4]
Category: Don't Let Me Go - Harry Styles (Song), Kiwi - Harry Styles (Song), Medicine - Harry Styles (Song), One Direction (Band), Sweet Creature - Harry Styles (Song)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 14:44:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16477517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mixedwithintellect/pseuds/mixedwithintellect
Summary: the one where you're on Harry's doorstep and he's just got home from the grocery store





	Love is the Punchline 3

Silence.

You knocked on the door again - three taps.

If your shaking hands weren’t proof enough, you were there. In California, in front of Harry’s flat, on the scratchy doormat, next to the potted plants, massively jet-lagged from your rushed flights. Fatigue could only do so much to pull you away from the blatant panic thrumming in your lungs.

Your stomach growled, unsatisfied by the dinner of bagged peanuts and soda. The post-flight griminess sensation had absolutely taken over the feel of your skin, the idea that your eyeballs could possibly fall out of your head. What was mainly keeping you from rest, or the possible clean-up before surprising your _best-friend-maybe-possible-lover_ was the fact that...no, you hadn’t booked a hotel room. Quite stupid, really, but you had been in the unfortunate position of needing to tell your cab driver an address, or exiting the vehicle to find your way around an unfamiliar, chaotic city for the remote chance of an open room.

Your plan could have been more thought-out, you realized. Harry’s tour was beginning in a few days, after all, and you had somehow expected him to be home, alone, doing nothing but waiting for you to rush in like it was a Hugh Jackman rom-com? _Highly unlikely_. You had realized this first when the cab driver, Thomas, had commented on the extreme wild night events that had been featured for that weekend. Your cheeks had maintained their approximate level of ‘so red they’re burning in hell’ since then, a precursor of embarrassment to the inevitable mortification around the corner.

You only had one bag, too, and it was mainly full of books to read, as an attempt to calm your nerves on the trip over.

Was the hallucination of love truly worth this? Had you actually flown to a different country with the intention of sweeping your best friend off his feet, when he was days away from taking off? Your thoughts had clouded together, morphing into a congealed entity of discussion and no over-riding conclusion. Basically, you were massively done for.

“ _Y/N_?”

Bewilderment had become a tangible smoke, crawling through his bones and evaporating from his words.

It felt cold on your skin.

Your hand was halfway in your purse, halfway to shoving your phone back in after you had checked the clock for the 400th time. Your other hand had been shoving your hair behind your ear, a half-noticed coping mechanism you had when particularly distressed. That was when you turned around, an attempt at a smile wordlessly exhausting itself on your lips.

The nerves were actually going to kill you, you decided, your stomach practically eating itself in stress. Poor Harry, he would have to watch you physically crumble into the wind if your heart-rate didn’t slow the _heck_ down.

“What are yeh doing out here, love?”

He was wearing a plain black shirt, jeans, and a cap that had his hair carelessly stuffed inside. Several locks had found an escape, which obviously was annoying as Harry blew out of the corner of his mouth at it, frowning. His hands were full, with cloth bags that were, in turn, full of groceries.

Harry stepped closer, setting the bags down on the porch so he could access his back pocket for his door keys. The bags clinked with glass. The keys jingled quietly. His eyes never left yours.

He looked, in the whole sense, shocked – perhaps not quite believing you were genuinely in California, waiting on his porch-step, with one bag and a grimace still plastered on your face.

“I’m not on the phone.”

“No, I suppose you aren’t,” he allowed, moving closer.

Not even the devil could smell that good.

It was only at the last second his glance shifted from you to his door, although it seemed rather reluctant. Maybe he believed the moment he was to look away, you would dissipate into the LA night. You weren’t entirely convinced he was wrong in that.

He moved past you, his shoulders blocking the view but you still heard the click of the lock, the opening of the door. You knelt down and gathered a few of his grocery bags along with your travel one, appreciative they would hide the shaking in your fingertips and the continual urge to take you back home, far away from confrontation and vulnerability. With everything you’d put into this plan, you still had yet to find the right words to start out this mess of a conversation.

Harry was soon behind you again, arms full of the leftover bags. You both walked into his home, you moving against the wall so Harry could close the door with his foot and lead the way to the kitchen.

It felt almost normal, which in itself felt incredibly wrong. You were there to break what had been normal, the secrecy and the allusions to what could have been. You were there to be everything you hadn’t.

The silence in the kitchen had transformed somewhat. He had begun shelving the food, working methodically and without really acknowledging you. It didn’t seem like he was out-right ignoring you, more as if he were waiting for you to start the conversation neither one of you knew how to begin. The ball was in your court, as it were.

You felt like you were waiting to be validated, in the strangest sense of the word, reaching out so long your arms felt infinite. Was he okay that you had showed up extremely unexpectedly? Was it too much, did he mean more separation than he implied in the voice mail? Was he waiting, just to reject you in the way you had to him?

You couldn’t express the correct words, your mind stopped your lips from moving so your soul could stay intact for a few moments longer. All preservation, all defense. Putting off the real moments, for the version you had felt before.

“When did you land?”

It was lightly worded, casual and common courtesy to ask, but the way his eyebrows were drawn together and his stare was kept strictly on the cans of black beans being shoved a bit harshly into his pantry – it wasn’t. The stitches were unraveling, one of you was about to become completely, and entirely, undone. The tension was there, thick ropes of it - who would be hanged first?

“Two hours ago. Bought tickets when..I...the night I called,” you finished lamely, hands motioning behind you gently. As if it could ever be behind you. Everything seemed too present to be real.

“I think about us.” The words left before your mind could register the danger in them.

He raised an eyebrow. Eyes shifted to the lettuce. The fridge opened. Lettuce placed gently in the drawer.

You continued, clarifying what you felt.

“I think about us more than I, perhaps, should.”

Harry was quiet, more for an absence of anything to say. His bags of groceries lay, forgotten, as the focus became the one he was anticipating. He kept his eyes downcast still, but you could tell he was paying extremely close attention to your words. His fingertips softly traced against one another, his feet shuffled on the hardwood floor.

The fridge closed.

Everything felt grossly explicit.

You closed your eyes briefly, recalling how gentle his touch was on your cheek. He had cared at one point, which hopefully meant some had transferred to the present. Your arrival couldn’t be entirely unwelcome, not when you realized his hands were trembling equal to yours, and not when desperation wracked itself around each word you spoke.

“I wish I didn’t call you..how I did..I wish I had told you everything sooner. I don’t want you thinking it was some drunk call because I couldn’t say it to your face.”

“Couldn’t yeh?”

You realized you preferred it when he wasn’t making eye contact. They were challenging yours, silently begging to know why you had let him drown, that night in the garden, and come back to help, arms loaded with more tubs of water for him to choke on.

He shook his head, clearly unimpressed by your silence.

“What are yeh doing, Y/N?”

You shrugged, too overwhelmed to say much of anything else. The line of vision was limited to his floors, the worn fronts of his shoes. Exhaustion rippled against your spine, begging to say ‘forget it’ and rush out before everything felt more intense. It already felt too much.

But.

This was Harry. The man who made the world make sense, the boy who saw in you more possibility than you knew what to do with. And he deserved the world twice over, he was worth it. He was worth it, he had never been anything less.

With somewhat renewed confidence, you managed to continue.

“Thank you, for being honest with me, before. I appreciat-”

You jumped, startled.

Harry had interrupted with a laugh. It was wrong, coming from an angel like him. It clawed at your heart, dripping ice into your veins.

“’ _Thank you’_? Thanks fo’ what? Thanks fo’ bleeding out to yeh? Thanks fo’ trying again and _again_ to be honest, after years of pretending? Thanks for taking the rejection so nicely, _Haz_ , I appreciate you letting me confessing my love when I’m drunk off my _ass_ and you can’t do anything about it, because you’re a bloody country away?”

The words “I’m here now” were hollow in his kitchen, a million years late.

Harry nodded, briskly turning his face to the side and biting his cheek. The anger he felt simmered too close to the surface to be properly contained, or even checked by his heart to see if Y/N even deserved it. His heart had taken a vacation, though, or perhaps permanent leave, and the scrapings of a hollowed chest could hold together for only so long.

She was still so beautiful. It only added to his anger, how he could feel angry at her when he looked in her eyes. How could she look so _pretty_ , when she had caused him so much hurt? He knew she hadn’t meant to, but what was done couldn’t be changed. Apologies felt like breath wasted. He couldn’t keep tossing his heart out to the wolves, expecting something different and growing more displeased when it was ruined.

“Yeah, and what is it yeh want?”

“I-I believe in you. More than anyone else. You scare me, sometimes, how brilliant you are.”

It didn’t ring like most compliments to his ears, although it was absolutely intended as one. Confession weighed down the corners, kept the words from flying at soft as they might’ve if your vocal chords weren’t knotted together in the echo of an un-tuned instrument. There was a truth somewhere, a revelation you were dancing around, struggling to appropriately address.

“I felt like both an impossibility and a limitation,” you stressed loudly, as if only remembering to speak up after rolling partially through an inner monologue.

“I couldn’t. Everything just, Haz, it felt like...I never knew what a body _felt like_ before I touched yours. And the possibility of that, matched with the possibility of reciprocation – it all seemed improbable. And even if we _had_ properly figured it out, and went steady or whatever it is kids do-” he rolled his eyes, not finding your rant particularly amusing “-the chance that we would last, it would have been infinitesimally small. You’re brilliant, H, and I could never bear to lose you. To limit you to _me_ , to make you realize your mistakes, that would hurt both of us.”

“Yeh actually think that’s true?” You flinched at how violent his words clashed into one another, the disgust writhing against his tongue and snarling his face into the sharp essence of revulsion. You glanced up. His arms crossed over his body, mouth set in a firm line.

Analyzing could’ve only get you so far, the true emotions were validated just by existence. Your biggest trial was to take the jump, the fall, the risk, whatever it was, into having faith that you both could make something beautiful. Before you could even _begin_ to try and respond, he continued.

“I was honored to be there, to be with yeh, to have yeh in my life. I couldn’t say what I did to deserve you, but whatever it was...I’d do a million times over.”

He took a step forward, his hands retreating to his sides. You had remained standing against the counter, across the kitchen from his position near the fridge. The neutral ground between you could be riddled with minefields, and it would only be moments before they went off. Harry stepped carefully.

“You’re beautiful because you’re every poem I’ve ever read. You live in the movies in my head, you’re on my mind when I do so much as wake up, or go to bed, or tie my shoes, or go for a walk. I can’t get yeh out.” His eyes flashed, as if they had gone mad, helplessly looking into yours.

He had been trying to get over you, although the concept was still as foreign to him as it had been when Jeff sat him down and told him sometimes life wasn’t fair, and all he could do was take care of himself.

After hearing your voice mail, though, the thoughts consuming Harry’s mind were of helping you, supporting you and introducing how goddamn _possible_ love was for you. How you were love, personified, and how can someone deny the existence of themselves? You were bitterly human, and all he felt was more love for you, for that reason. The stoic response you had to his almost-confession in his kitchen had kept him from understanding your humanity, but he slowly understood where your hesitancy lay.

“Look in meh eyes,” it was a demand, insistent and his hands reached out to grab yours and you could feel every edge of his fingerprints digging into your wrists and his eyes were so clear, fuck, they were blurry but it was on your end, not really his and -

“Do yeh see it?! Do you see _any_ fucking _disappointment_?” his words were seething in their low tone but he shook his fists, your wrists moving rapidly with them, “I’ve seen everything, I was there when yeh couldn’t leave yeh house for months and I was there when the only words yeh knew were the labels of those fucking glass bottles in yeh kitchen. I was there with you, I saw you, I love you. Why can’t it just be us, and we properly show each other the love we have? How can you love me and turn me away?”

The silence returned, utterly unwelcome yet your mouth couldn’t properly work to break it. Your heart, startled anew by the copious quantity of caffeine you had chugged during your travels, pounded at its cage, demanding your brain to fight the logic of his words. There was nothing you could argue, you were emotionally naked and this was it. It was all out on the line.

He stepped away, let your wrists go.

“Okay.” was all he said. Your heart was throbbing with frustration, your mouth opening and closing, a finale of sorts.

Looking up, you were unsettled. The skin under his eyes was puffy, his cheeks flushed and his lips bitten. Perhaps he had been in a similar state before, the devastation still lodged in his eyes and the motion of his throat, and you hadn’t seen it beyond the glaze of your own tears.

One let go from his left eye, drifting down his cheek.

“Don’t cry,” you whispered, your voice feeling rather raw against a throat that had continuously felt boarded-up throughout the night. You brushed the tear off before it could bother his lips, his eyes were trained away from you. It was an act of trust, letting you so close, to ignore the anger and let himself fall apart.

He took another step backwards, shifting his shoulders a bit towards the hallway door. The memories from the kitchen flooded back with screeches, like brakes working in place before the fatal crash, the horror of losing him again forcing your both to act instinctively.

“Please,” the sobs were close in his chest, you felt them like you would a torrent of rain, “I can’t listen to it again. I-I can’t listen to you cry and not do anything, I can’t, I can’t let go again. It-it would wreck me, I’m already half gone and you’re the other half, _fuck Ha_ _rry_ you’re the other half, please don’t leave. The words won’t come out right, I keep trying, I promise, I promise – god, please stop crying, please, please stop. I love you so much, so, so much and please stop, oh god you’re crying-”

You drew nearer to him, holding his cheeks with the palms of your hands and moving your fingers to loosely draw away his tears. You couldn’t be too sure if you were remotely accurate, your own vision obscured. It was a scene of pathetic sorrow, exhaustion drenching you both and loosening the screws of your spines, slowly, slowly.

He had remained still for a moment, being simple in letting the fear loose from the corners of hie eyes. He hadn’t been sure how to interpret your silence, going back to the idea of rejection and confirming that you had flown out to California to continue a conversation that, he felt, had no good end.

His hands grazed the sides of your hips. Barely, at first, and then again. Once more, feeling the curves of your body and resting against them. He seemed hesitant, expecting you to tell him off, or move back, or to take his crying as an excuse for a feel, but it wasn’t sexual. It was his way of pulling you closer, of accepting that, yeah, maybe you didn’t know the words yet but you knew his body.

Although the tears were not stopping, he sniffed and nuzzled your hands out of the way so his head could burrow into your neck, arms wrapping tighter for a fierce embrace. This, you knew how to communicate back with.

Without a second thought, your arms held onto the nape of his neck, curled up in the short hairs that were sticking up under his cap. Your head was against his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut as you listened carefully to the motions of his body wracking with silent crying.

You hadn’t noticed it, but Harry felt your body shaking as well, the traveling and the emotions of the past few days having taken a massive toll on your energy levels. You two stood there, a torpedo of love and misunderstanding, anger and passion, forgiveness and empathy.

“I’m not drunk, and I love you. I love you, I love you, I’ll tell you every second of every gosh darn day how much I love you, you’re everything, and it is so real. And I don’t think I mind,” you quietly mumbled against his shoulder, grinning slightly and doing a weird cry-laugh.

“Yeh horoscope said you’d be a bit emotional this week. Jupiter’s in some library, I think.”

You pulled your head back, bewildered at the fact Harry would even _know_ your horoscope, much less be intrigued enough to check in on how the universe was treating you in the midst of your fight.

He pulled back, as well, to give you a cheeky grin that had snuck its way against the grains of the slowing tears. Harry half-shrugged, pulling you in again to squeeze you, tightly against his chest. It was then that it really sunk in for him, how physically you were there – how, physically, you had traveled across the world because you love him. You. Love. Him.

(If he started goofily beaming like a goddamn 12-year-old who saw a naked girl’s chest for the first time, it wasn’t for anyone to know but him.)

You were a giggling mess, high off the intense emotions that had played with your heartstrings like a puppet marionette. Part of you wasn’t convinced it had been real, that the night would give way to a morning that showed you, alone, in your bed back at home.

It sure felt real, when Harry slid his hands up your back, cupping your cheeks, and moving in to kiss you. Perhaps it still felt too intense, everything occurring within such a short time span, but what the hell, you and Harry were never good at making things easy.

His lips tasted like mint. It was all you could properly focus on, the rest of your mind growing increasingly foggy with weariness and a craving to know if his body tasted the same. The two sides fought against one another, especially when Harry’s hands drifted downwards and his tongue quickened in pace and grew sloppier, down the side of your neck and marking _that spot_ behind your ear – but eventually the stifled yawn could remain so for only so long.

You and Harry were alright. The nerves had quelled, the heartbreak had healed. Harry’s heart had returned, after all, better than ever after a restful vacation. He had understood your fatigue, he himself having been victim to it for years, and you two drifted, together, towards his bedroom. Laughter kept bubbling up between your lungs and his lips, mixing together in a harmony of tear-dried giggles and fits of inexplicable amusement.

Love really was the funniest thing.

\- 2 months later -

Harry had left that morning, dashing to the airport in a flurry of glitter, satin, and something he called ‘pussy bows’ that you 100% felt were _not_ supposed to be called that, under any context _ever_. He had quickly kissed you goodbye, made it to the doorway, before smirking and wandering back over, kissing you proper.

Jeff had made a gagging noise by the front door, but you were fairly sure he was secretly pleased with how things had turned out. Probably wasn’t even so secret, considering how he drunkenly boasted about how he “was the catalyst that began them, true and honest” during one of the concert’s after parties.

You had toured with Harry a bit, for what you could with your limited vacation days. He had appreciated every moment of it, soaking in the praise at night and the extra bits in the morning. You were a perfect fit in his tour life – a genuine poker competitor with the rest of his band (which reminded him, Mitch owed you $20), a real help when it came to sound and light check, and a _fantastic_ roommate after the shows.

Things hadn’t been as strange as you had feared, nothing in your relationship with Harry changed fundamentally – except that Harry’s compliments were now far more X-rated than before, and he hadn’t typically bought you so many presents when you were only platonically involved.

Speaking of, there was a litter of them scattered around your shared apartment, waiting for you to find them throughout the day. You groaned at each one, sending H a pic with “lol” being the general go-to caption and his faux indignant response that you were not properly appreciating the wonderful comedian Harry Styles could be.

To be fair, they were generally funny. A Post-It was next to your cup of coffee, reading _Words cannot_ espresso _how much you mean to me._ Even though it wasn’t an espresso, it didn’t stop the flattered smile digging into your dimples for the rest of the morning.

In your work email, there was a receipt from a company working to Save the Bees from Extinction. They had thanked you profusely for your contribution. Immediately sensing the Styles aura from the letter, you sent a screenshot to Harry with a bunch of ????s.

**We bee-long together. :-)**

_Haz._

**Plus you never shut up about the damned bees, they’ll be fine now.**

 

Your particular favorite, though, was the teddy bear that would find its way to your doorstep, with a bright pink bow and custom teddy bear Gucci suit, its lapel reading “Can’t bear to be apart. See you soon. x.”

That gift in particular promised the quick arrival of your lovely, perfect, wonderful, understanding, and yes – perhaps even _funny –_ boyfriend.

 


End file.
